Brooklyn Mass Timber
sustainable design
Summary
What if New York’s most valuable asset wasn’t land or capital, but the leftover spaces between buildings? Instead of treating these irregular infill lots as afterthoughts, we imagine them as ideal conditions for a new architectural ecosystem: a city-wide kit of parts that can take root anywhere. By deploying a mass-timber system that is adaptable, sustainable, and economical, we shift from designing a single building to proposing an urban growth protocol. Our ambition is two-fold: achieve carbon neutrality and create a new form of living that outperforms the conventional apartment block—lighter, warmer, smarter, and attuned to the rhythms of its inhabitants.
Idea
How can we turn the overlooked spaces of New York into the blueprint for its most desirable future? At the most fundamental level, the solution is an architectural DNA: a hyper-efficient service core paired with a telescoping volumetric chassis. Together, they enable a repeatable system that responds to any local site context without breaking the building’s unifying form and legibility. The system can stretch or compress to occupy any lot width, from the sliver sites of the Lower East Side to the expansive parcels of Brooklyn and Queens. The result, developed in collaboration with neighbor and part of a DOB/EDC-sponsored NYC-wide Mass Timber Studio, is a city-scale family of buildings: each unique yet all related, forming an urban species evolved to solve New York’s housing deficit with elegance and efficiency.
Expression
The architectural language follows the construction logic of its kit-of-parts building system. The humble box beam, one of the most rational inventions of structural engineering, becomes the protagonist. When multiplied, stacked, and interlocked, it expands three-dimensionally toward the skyline and becomes the signature gesture that unifies the building network. While the geometry may shift in response to each site, the essential fabric remains, a defining rhythm of timber modules that reads simultaneously as structure, space, and ornament.
Impact
Renewable, carbon-sequestering, and perfectly suited for prefabrication, mass timber allows this innovative building system to be deployed at scale with considered design, industrial precision, and ecological sensitivity. The material and building system create an environment that is greener to build, faster to assemble, and genuinely better to live in. This city-wide network of mass-timber buildings will form a carbon sink in one of the most built-up urban environments in the world.